Free Webmaster Tools Improve Site Results

The two major search engines as well as other sites offer free webmaster tools that make it easier to improve site performance.

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools both provide a wide array of services that identify problems that hold a site back from higher rankings in search results.

Website managers and staff will find that both tool sets are worth investigating. Google is the most useful for anyone who wants higher rankings in the Google search engine. Ditto for Microsoft Bing.

Both products provide a similar set of services. So anyone stretched for time can focus on Google because it is the dominant search engine. Bing provides another perspective and a small advantage with improving search results with that search engine.

Google Search Console

Google has too many tools to cover in one article. Some of the most useful ones include:

Bad links on the site

Bad links to the site

Page clicks, rankings and impressions based on search queries

Links to the site from other sites

Mobile usability

If nothing else, a site manager should use the product for the sake of identifying and fixing bad links.

Bad links on a site can reduce site search rankings. Bad links to a site — which can be repaired in the htaccess file — are a lost opportunity for higher rankings.

The “analytics” report with page clicks, rankings and impressions will give a true picture of how certain pages rank on Google. Simply doing a search in Google for a page’s rank is no longer an accurate guide because the rank depends on so many factors.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Like the Google product, Bing Webmaster Tools will show the number of pages indexed in the Bing search engine, how many impressions they receive, how many clicks they get, etc.

It does have a few features that outdo Google. One is an SEO analyzer that will provide suggestions on improving a page for search results.

It also has a keyword research tool that will show how well the site ranks in Bing based on specific keywords. The tool can narrow down the results according to the country and language of the visitors.

The Index Explorer is unique in that it gives a hierarchical view of the site based on folders and files. The tool is helpful in advancing site navigation and finding folders that may no longer be accessible on the public part of the site.